I'll Miss My ECFE Classmates

Everyone tells you as a parent that "it goes by quickly."  So, too, does the ECFE year, where we lamented about, well, how our kids are growing up so quickly.  It's too easy to get caught up in whatever the challenge of the week is with your kids and not see how much they've grown.  But oh my gosh, they have and they've achieved some big milestones.  Oliver tackled potty-training and successfully dropped a nap. Soren started the year by crawling and finished by being able to walk with us all the way to school. He experienced various levels of separation anxiety, but during the past few weeks, he'd let me leave without so much as a quiver of the lip and his teachers would report afterward about what a blast he had.   While the kids still don't always treat each other with "kind and consideration" like our house rules call for, I had forgotten, until a classmate reminded me, that at the beginning of the year, I was worried about how vulnerable I felt my once-tiny Soren was in comparison to Oliver who would push him over to get attention. I was at wit's end with how to deal with the situation and spent half a class discussing it.  And like so much else, the problem fell into the category of "this too shall pass."

Now I face an entire summer  with no weekly check-ins.  No opportunity to bounce ideas or frustrations off a group of empathetic ears.  It's difficult to leave a group when I look around the room and realize that I learned something from every single parent sitting at the table.  Whether it was telling a story about their own joys or challenges or brainstorming ideas or providing tips, I am a better parent because of every single one of them. 

One parent commented on the night of our last class how parenting is such a personal journey, yet the experience is so common and mundane.  That's all the more reason 13 families come together every Monday night.  Parenting is a more enjoyable and enlightening journey when taken together.